Jan
10

Sprint 12: Goodies for the New Year

First the really good news: we hit over 160,000 Twitter followers across our accounts last month. Yay for us!

For the following site upgrades, most are technology fixes and upgrades, so you are duly forewarned.

  • We paginated our Leaderboard, so the pages loads faster and you can do a deeper dive on your favorite sports
  • We are now aggregating all of the player and team tweets from Major League Soccer, as you can see here via our list of MLS Tweets
  • Fixed a weird glitch with SIU Edwardsville Cougars’s basketball schedule, because we were besieged with requests and prioritized it
  • We added monitoring to all of our server processes to ensure better uptime
  • We upgraded SQL Alchemy and Mako to versions 0.6.5 and 0.3.6 respectively
  • We are publishing some additional material directly out of Solr
  • We upgraded and fixed a number of FanFeedr API calls, which are noted in detail on the developer portal

More good stuff in the pipeline, and thank you, as always for using the service.

Thanks, FanFeedr

Dec
28

Sprint 12: Upgrades on the backend

On the front end, first, however.

  • Made sure that photos publish to Facebook. They were performing erratically before.
  • Major League Soccer team twitter accounts are now appearing on the FanFeedr service
  • We had an issue in NCAA Basketball where Div 1 teams playing non-Div 1 teams would generate schedule errors. That is fixed.

We have spent a lot of time working on our backend this last Sprint, including

  • Upgrades to our ORM, SQL Alchemy
  • Upgrades to our Mako templates
  • Publishing scores and the like directly out of Solr

That is it. We hope that you are having a fantastic holiday season.

Happy holidays, and best wishes in the New Year, FanFeedr

May
27

R64: Tracking NBA Free-Agents and European Football Transfers

We heard your request, especially from Knicks’ followers: we want to be able to track all of the free-agent/football transfer news on a per-team basis. Problem solved.
We have a new filter on each team and player page that gives you just that: all team changes, all the time. Some examples . . .

NBA free-agent news

Premier League Football transfer news

La Liga Football transfer news

One last new feature: we have added the ability to customize your feed on the team pages so that you can see just the information that is important to you. When you go to a team or player page, you can turn on some, all or none of the Filters in the left column.

Additionally, some bug fixes:

  • Twitter suppression on the home page is permanent. If you select it, it will stick even if you leave and come back.
  • Added a link to “Hot Pick’Em games” in the right column of the home page to all of the Pick’Em games.
  • Improved the frequency and type of stories that we publish to our popular Facebook team pages, like the LA Angels or New York Yankees.

Another great week of work by our talented engineering team.

Thanks, FanFeedr

May
21

R63: Pick’Em and our user experience

This is a pretty straightforward release: Pick’Em has been added to the FanFeedr home page so that you don’t have to search for it.

You can pick games directly on the front of FanFeedr.com so that you don’t have to go to the Pick’Em homepage.

Also, we added a new World Cup news section on Facebook.

Let us know if we can provide you with other features right here.

Thanks, as always, FanFeedr

May
17

R62: Control your destiny

Release 62 is all about giving you more control over what publishes to Facebook and Twitter from FanFeedr, and how frequently.

  • With that in mind, we have a new pop-up panel that controls what gets pushed out to both sites. We also made it so that you can get notified whenever you have a new follower. We won’t ever send you mails without your ability to control them. The controls can be accessed via your profile page account settings, and it looks like this:

As always, thanks for your support, and let us know if we missed anything right here.

Feedr of the Fans

Mar
19

R54, for even the wackiest brackets

I know we all love our annual office bracket pools, but they do suffer from a rather obvious flaw: namely, after the inevitable first-round upsets, a lot of people are effectively shut out of the competition. You know the feeling — you follow the standings, ratings and games all year, only to have your meticulously researched bracket trumped by Maureen from Accounting by 6pm the first day.
Well, the FanFeedr NCAA Tournament Pick ’Em game doesn’t allow such gross miscarriages of justice. All you have to do is pick 3 out of 4 games right for each round of the tournament, and you’ll receive a badge proclaiming your all-around prognosticating excellence. Maureen doesn’t stand a chance. What’s more, you can watch the games online as you check your progress in each round.
Here’s the total rundown:
  • NCAA Tournament
    • New badges. We’ve created special badges for Round of 32, Sweet 16, Elite 8, Final Four and Championship game winners.
    • Online video links. We’ve provided integration with CBS March Madness on Demand Internet video on scoreboard and team pages, so it’s even easier to keep track of the action.
  • Pick ’Em refinements
    • Game opportunities on Twitter and Facebook. Subscribers of our Facebook news pages and Twitter feeds now receive game opportunities in their feeds, so they won’t miss a chance to bet on their favorite teams.
    • Picks now appear on all games. Now it’s dead simple to keep track of your Pick ’Em record: just look up the games from last night (or the night before) and witness the fruits of your labor against the game results.
  • Plus: new Facebook pages for F1 and NASCAR racing teams, RSS feeds for local area teams, and more.
  • Last but not least: RSS for the home page. You can now get your personalized FanFeed delivered to your feed-reader of choice.
As always, we’re interested in hearing your thoughts, so hit us up on the Feedback button, and we thank you for your support.
Until next time,
Your friends at FanFeedr.
Mar
12

R53: Laying the table for March Tournament Pick’Em

Straight to the goodies.

More real-time goodness

  • We are publishing in real time to Facebook through the API, so no more of that RSS lateness
  • Facebook team pages also get scores, photos, and videos, so that you don’t have to go elsewhere to get everything about your favorite teams
  • We are now publishing our RSS feeds via Pubsubhubbub, which means you can get them completely in real-time, with no latency
  • Scores and photos are have also been included in the RSS feeds on FanFeedr.com.

Pick’Em enhancements

  • We are now publishing the opportunity to pick your favorite NBA and NHL games directly to our Twitter and Facebook feeds so that you don’t have to come searching to bet.
  • We reduced the number of times that Pick’Em picks publish to your Facebook feed. You will only see them once a day at the very most so that we don’t overwhelm your posts.
  • We also reduced the publishing of picks on FanFeedr to just the first pick you make each day so that you can see everyone in the Public Timeline, and, more importantly, so that your own feed isn’t overwhelmed.
  • On Monday, you can pick the NCAA tournament, and we have special badges for each bracket

Racing improvements

NASCAR

Formula 1

  • We now have individual pages for each of the Formula 1 teams, like Ferrari and BMW Sauber
  • We also have Twitter accounts for Ferrari and Mercedes

Technical stuff

  • Fixed a bug whereby posts to Facebook didn’t work properly

We hope that you enjoy the tournaments this weekend, and look forward to checking out your Picks in a couple of days, FanFeedr

Mar
05

R52: One year anniversary edition, now with Twitter Authentication

Hello and good morning/afternoon/evening.

This week we enabled the ability to sign up using Twitter as well as Facebook, so if you would like to use those credentials as the primary way you login to the site, no problem. You can also post material to and from Facebook, but you will be known on the service primarily by your Twitter handle.

You can try it out by going to the homepage and logging in with Twitter. If you already have an account with us, you can add your twitter credentials whenever you make a comment and post to twitter or if you share via Twitter.

Facebook

You can follow your favorite teams on Facebook now, and that functionality is exposed on the team pages (in the left column, the blue button.)

Some examples of team pages on Facebook:

These feeds publish headlines, scores, boxscores, photos and other updates directly on Facebook.

Pick’Em Game

  • We fixed the badging so that there is only one Commissioner, and so that Newbies show up in the right place

Content

UX

And we are up to 7,000 content sources, including all of the material submitted in the past month.

Thanks for your support, and let us know if we are missing anything, here.

FanFeedr

Mar
01

R51: The little things come together

  • More content: Over 6,700 sources
  • Better team info: we re-organized rosters, schedules and added logos to all of the teams
  • Reorganization in advance of March Madness: logos, moved all of the teams into their proper conferences

That’s it, more racing stuff coming this week.

Thanks for supporting us, FanFeedr

Jan
22

Release 47 is in the wild

And robust like single-field Ethiopian dark roast, ground before your eyes.


The big deal this week are widgets, as we have a single page where you can generate widgets for your favorite team or player, or for your favorite city/town/suburb.

Improvements in search

Other material, warmed directly in the FanFeedr oven:

Have a great weekend, thanks, FanFeedr